Organize your account with ad groups

Organizing your account allows you to better serve the right ads to the right customers, and it allows you to better track the effectiveness of your advertising efforts.When people are searching online and they type a word or phrase, they're looking for information that's closely tied to those words. For example, if Eric types digital cameras and he sees an ad for film reels, he probably won't click the ad.

To show ads that are relevant to the searches of people you're trying to reach, bundle related ads together with related keywords into an ad group. That way, all of your related ads can be shown to customers searching for similar things.

Although there isn’t one correct way to organize your account, this article goes over some best practices you can follow.

Best practices

Organize your campaigns and ad groups as you create them. Reorganizing your account after you've created several campaigns and ad groups wipes out all the valuable data you've accumulated, possibly affecting how your ads perform.

When you need to use a different set of campaigns settings (ex: budget or location targeting), create a separate campaign. For instance, if you sell clothing, you may want to set a budget for shirts and a different budget for pants. In this case, you should create a campaign for shirts, and another campaign for pants.

If you want all your ads to share a budget and you want to target the same set of locations, then you can just use one campaign.

For each ad group, pick a narrow theme and create ad groups around that theme. For each ad group, use keywords related to that theme. Consider also having your ads mention at least one of your keywords in its headline. This is because when someone searches for a term that matches your keyword, and they see one ad that mentions the keyword and another ad that doesn't mention the keyword, they are more likely to think that the first ad is more relevant to what they're searching for.

You never know what message might resonate best with potential customers. Because of this, we recommend having at least 2-3 ads in each ad group. Most advertisers will then set the "ad rotation" campaign setting to either "Optimize for clicks" or "Optimize for conversions" which means that your ads will show on a rotating basis until we've learned how each ad performs. Once performance data is gathered, your higher performing ads will show more often. Learn about Ad rotation settings.

Example

Let's say you own an online electronics store and you create an AdWords account so you can begin to advertise the products that you sell. At the account level you can choose who else you'd like to have access to your AdWords account and your preferred payment method. The top-most layer of your account might look as follows:

Account

Online electronics store

Organize your campaigns

A campaign consists of a collection of ad groups. For your campaign, consider the following:

How much you're willing to spend on clicks or conversions from your ads

Networks and geographical locations where you want your ads to show.

Other top-level settings that affect clusters of ad groups

For example, let’s say you want to create ads for your inventory of televisions and cameras, so you create separate campaigns for each.

Campaign

Campaign

Televisions

Cameras

Organize your ad groups

A common method for organizing an AdWords account is to organize with a category or business goal in mind. For many businesses, the way your website is structured is a good place to start, where each ad group representing a different page or category on your site.

Ad groups can help ensure that your ads are relevant to your keywords. For example, for your camera campaign, you may want to create separate ads for digital cameras and compact cameras. You can create ad groups for each type of camera, each with its own set of focused, relevant keywords. For your television campaign, you can also create an ad group for each type of television you sell, such as flat screen and plasma TVs.

Ad Group

Ad Group

Ad Group

Ad Group

Flat Screen TVs

Plasma TVs

Digital Cameras

Compact Cameras

Within a particular ad group, you'll want to choose keywords that are closely linked to your ad text. For your digital cameras ad group, you might try keywords for different brands, models, and prices for the digital cameras you sell.